“Unka Sankalp, Vipareet Bharat”
“Sab ka naash, Sab ka Vinaash”
April 27, 2024
By Aravind Bhatikar
IF THERE were a competition among the prime ministers of the world to select the most compulsive and perennial liar, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have easily won the gold medal for years together without a break.
The low turnout in the first phase of the Lok Sabha election in BJP strongholds has caused tremors in the party. Modi must have decided to go back to his old strategies of communal polarization to attract more Hindu votes. The first phase was over on April 19 and the damage that might have been caused to the BJP due to low turnout of voters cannot be undone now. There is still time to retrieve the situation in the remaining 6 phases.
Modi began the retrieval process last Sunday at an election rally at Banswada in Rajasthan. His venomous diatribe against Muslims shocked not only the nation but many other countries as well. The first lie which Modi has already tried to spread earlier was that the Muslim League had a hand in drafting the manifesto of the Congress.
He began his latest chain of lies by alleging that Dr Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister of India, had said in an address in 2006 that Muslims had to be given the first priority in the allocation of the national resources. Dr Manmohan Singh had actually in his address to the National Development Council in 2006, said that the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Backward classes, the poor and the minorities including Muslims, should have the first claim on national wealth. The fact that Modi had to dig out an 18-year-old speech of Dr Manmohan Singh to turn and twist its content is proof enough to expose Modi’s political bankruptcy after 10 years of his rule.
Worse still was Modi’s reference to Muslims as “infiltrator” and “those who produce more children.” He could no longer hide his visceral hatred of the Congress and Muslims when he went to the extent of saying that the Congress would remove the “mangalsutra” of our “mothers and sisters” and hand this over to “them.”
The unstoppable Tejashwi Yadav of Bihar asked Modi a few questions, the answers to which were obvious. The questions were:
Who was responsible for demonetizing 500 and 1000 rupee notes resulting in the death of more than 100 men who had to stand in long queues for hours together to exchange their banned notes? Who was responsible for taking away the “mangalsutra” of the wives of the dead?
Who was responsible for taking away the “mangalsutra” of 40 young women, wives of the CRPF jawans killed in the Pulwama terrorist attack?
Who was responsible for taking away the “mangalsutra” of 20 women, wives of our army martyrs who laid down their lives fighting the Chinese on our borders in Ladakh?
Who was responsible for taking away the “mangalsutra” of hundreds of wives of farmers who died in their 13-month-long agitation against Modi and his government for the repeal of anti-farmer laws?
The answer to all the above questions is: Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India.
A prime minister who is guilty of taking away the mangalsutra of so many Indian women should not accuse the main opposition party in the country of taking away mangalsutra of India’s “mothers and sisters.”
Besides, does any person who after marriage, deserts his wife, have the right to speak about sanctity of mangalsutra?
Modi’s latest lie relates to the abolition of estate duty in India. He has accused that late Rajiv Gandhi had abolished the estate duty because he wanted to inherit Indira Gandhi’s property without paying any tax to the government. How long should WE, THE PEOPLE tolerate a prime minister who is a compulsive liar? Shouldn’t WE, THE PEOPLE defeat the liar-dictator?
May 01, 2024
MODIGATE AND MODI FATIGUE-II
INDIA is the largest democracy in the World. Naturally, everything about this democracy has to be the largest, the biggest, the most complicated, most unpredictable and all that! The prime minister of this largest democracy will inevitably be a “Vishwaguru”, whether you like him or not. The world can learn from him how to deliver long hollow speeches without boring his audience, how to tell lies without batting an eyelid and how to promote his image unabashedly by misusing government funds.
The world should learn from him how to perpetrate financial frauds on our multi-party democracy, to fund his own political party and to use these fraudulently collected funds to convert our multi-party democracy into a single party democracy like North Korea.
But the so called Gujarat lobby seems to be running out of luck! Modi’s slogan “Iss baar, char sau paar” seems to be the beginning of the end of his rule. As Akhilesh Yadav put it, the slogan should be, “Iss baar, chaar sau haar” or as Udhhav Thackeray quipped “Iss baar tadi paar.” The ill-advised initiative taken by Anant Hegde, Jyoti Mirdha, Lallu Singh, Arun Govil, etc to explain to their audiences that BJP needs to win 400 seats in Parliament in order to change the Indian constitution, set off alarm bells throughout the country.
For a change, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashvi Yadav, Sanjay Singh and other leaders of INDIA alliance went aggressive and explained to the vast Indian masses how the BJP wanted to put an end to the protection given to them by the Constitution.
The first and second phase of the Lok Sabha polls has seen a much lower turnout than in 2019. What was more alarming for the BJP was that the lower turnout was primarily in their strongholds. Independent political analysts and sephologists have predicted that BJP/NDA would lose half of their seats in the Lok Sabha they have held since 2019. Unless, of course, the desperate assurances given by Prime Minister Modi and RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat about the absence of any such plans of changing the Constitution, gain traction with masses and improves the turn-out of voters.
“Vishwaguru” and his team are now devising new ways to win an election before polling starts. If these new strategies succeed, the role of voters will be irrelevant in our democracy, because BJP candidates would have won long before polling starts.
The nomination of Nilesh Kumbhani, a Congress candidate for a Lok Sabha seat in Surat, was rejected by the returning officer since three of the proposals informed the returning officer that they had not proposed Nilesh Kumbhani’s name and that the signatures under their names were not their signatures. Eight independent candidates who were in the fray also withdrew from the race. It was most probably the huge money power of BJP which had managed the victory for its candidates much before polling started.
The proposers who created the problem for Nilesh Kumbhani were all his relatives. The funds illegally collected by the BJP through the electoral bond scheme might have been thus used to sabotage the spirit of our democracy.
Use of money power is not the only method BJP employs to achieve questionable victories. Akshay Kanti Bam, a Congress candidate in a Lok Sabha constituency in Indore, withdrew his candidature just before the expiry of the time limit for such withdrawals. The reason? There was a criminal case pending against him from 2017 which was possibly not good enough to threaten him into political surrender. A fresh charge under section 307 (attempt to murder) was made against him. Akshay Kanti Bam had now only two options – either go to jail or withdraw from the contest and join the BJP, like most Congressmen opposition politicians who surrendered to BJP’s blackmail. Akshay chose the latter option. Incidentally, Akshay is reportedly extremely rich and had declared Rs78 crore as the value of his assets. The money-bet might not have worked in his case.
Modi and Shah have seen the writing on the wall. Before they pack their bags and go back to Gujarat, they want to try a new strategy to win elections before even the polling process begins. The Vishwaguru is going to introduce to the world a new democracy where voters have no role to play.
If you want our Constitution and democracy to survive WE, THE PEOPLE have to act now. It is now or never! WE, THE PEOPLE should do whatever we can to defeat the BJP and expel Modi and Shah for life from our political system.
